Actor Liam Neeson is making headlines for comments made in a new interview, in which he stated he walked around for a week with the hope of killing a black person to avenge a friend who said she was raped by a black man.
“My immediate reaction was…I asked, did she know who it was? No. What color were they? She said it was a black person,” the actor, notable for his role in the film series Taken, told The Independent in an interview published Monday (Feb. 4).
Neeson continued to explain his story, in which he detailed that for some time after the attack, he walked “up and down areas” with a baton “hoping [he’d] be approached by somebody.”
“I’m ashamed to say that – and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him,” he continued.
The interviewer noted that 66-year-old Neeson is now ashamed by his past thoughts and mindset.
“It’s awful,” he said at the end of his story. “But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the f**k are you doing,’ you know?”
Neeson hasn’t commented on the backlash to his tale.